A change notification system is often included as a part of a collaborative system. A change notification system, in general, is a mechanism or subsystem that is responsible for sending notifications to users responsive to a change relating to an artifact that is stored, managed, or otherwise monitored by the collaborative system. The notification that is sent is a message that advises a user of the change relating to the artifact. Examples of messages that can be used or sent as a notification include, but are not limited to, an electronic mail, a text and/or instant message, a feed, a telephone call, or the like.
In a conventional collaborative system, the change notification system embraces an “all or nothing” approach to notifications. For a given change to an artifact, notification(s) are sent to each user that is subscribed to the artifact. If one is not subscribed to the artifact, that individual does not receive a notification of the change. Thus, the determination of whether to send a notification is a binary decision predicated upon whether a change to the artifact has occurred. In the usual case, the “all or nothing” approach to notifications leads to users receiving a large number of notifications and what is often referred to as “information overload.” The number of notifications received by a user tends to be so large that critical notifications become lost among many non-critical notifications also received by the user.